


Unpredictable, Unexpected, Uncontrollable, Unbearable

by Nny



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Stardust Fusion, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-08 04:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13450416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Nny
Summary: A long distant howl sounded, starting low and throbbing and rising to an unearthly wail that lingered in the night air, sharper than any oyster knife. It came from beyond the Wall, as all such things did, and when it finally died away there was a long moment’s silence. (That Lydia only cocked her head and listened intently, didn’t shake or mutter nursery charms or make a sign against evil, was one of the reasons Stiles loved her quite so dearly).“For your love,” Stiles said, low and intent, “I’d bring back the heart of that wolf and place it in your hands."(Of course, that's not quite how the story goes...)





	1. Concerning the Making of Young Mr Stilinski

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lissadiane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/gifts).



> New chapters will appear on Mondays.
> 
> Tags and characters will be added as I continue writing.

It was possible that Noah Stilinski, the baker’s boy, with his eyes as blue as the midday sky and his hair golden as rolling fields of wheat, came by his post honestly. He was a popular boy through his childhood, solid and sensible and far more grown than his size would suggest, taking on errands around the bakery and translating the odd hushing tongue of his parents into words regular Beacon folks could understand. He became a familiar sight, running on his small sturdy legs with parcels and packages and brown paper bags, and he was like lightning with his numbers, handing back precise change and squinting suspiciously with those piercing blue eyes if he thought a penny might’ve gone astray.

His arms grew strong and his back straight, and when, in his nineteenth year, they came looking for guards to mind the Wall, he was a clear choice. And he did his duty with diligence and pride, and he made sure that no one walked into the Wood unless…

Unless it was the Wolf Moon, and market day, and the usual rules were temporarily set aside.

The Wolf Moon brought all sorts to the inns and boarding houses of Beacon Hills. It seemed to call to them, like there was something strange in the quality of sounds, like there was something just on the cusp of being heard. Folk came into town from miles and countries and worlds around, and every bed that could be made was tied up with people with odd eyes, and strange words, and just a few too many teeth.

And one night, when the moon was full and the stars were bright in the clear, cold sky, the visitors would walk in solemn procession through the gap in the Wall and on into the Wood, and they would start to run once they reached the shadow of the trees, and there would be for the rest of the night such a howling and a clattering and a celebrating and a revelling that the folks of Beacon Hills got not one wink of sleep. In the morning, the visitors would walk back out of the Woods – or most of them, at least – and adjust their ripped Sunday best, and they would make their way in carriages and on horses back on whatever road had carried them to Beacon, safely away for another year.

Except for that one year, that one Wolf Moon, when Noah Stilinski had walked into the Wood with them.

No one spoke of it afterward. It was rather as though it had never quite happened, and if it weren’t for the memories that felt more like they were dreams, Noah wasn’t sure he would believe it himself. He might have dismissed it entirely save that on his return he found that he had left his heart behind in the Wood; left it at the base of a tree with a girl with dark hair and bright eyes and almost, sometimes, twigs for fingers, and almost, sometimes perhaps a tail. And he found out, later, that he had left her with something else, too…

So it was possible that Noah Stilinski was the most trusted, the most reliable, the most steadfast of men, and that was why there was not one dissenting voice when he was voted the Sheriff of Beacon Hills, last line of defence of the Wall before the Wood. It was possible – likely, even – with his record of fairness and dedication to the spirit if not always the letter of the law, that he was in fact the best man for the job.

Then again, there was always the chance that it was because his son had to be hauled, struggling, back over the Wall at least once a week and twice on full moons, and no one else was willing to take on the job.

-

How Stiles Stilinski started his life was the subject of much debate, mostly over tea cups and behind closed doors. He was a nightmare child, a hellion, loud and distracted and an exception to the rule that children should be seen and most certainly not heard; when Stiles Stilinski was in the vicinity it was preferable by far to have him right under your nose, even if you could not keep him quiet. Stiles Stilinski had a capacity for mischief that was quite unmatched by any other child in the village, and a knack for learning that outstripped everyone but the Martin girl. Even his newest clothes had patches on the elbows and the knees, sewn on with a clumsy hand – for his father had never married, even though there were many interested parties and eligible bachelors were few – and grass-green stained all but his Sunday best. Yet he also had a smile like sunlight, and a laugh like a gurgling brook, and somehow managed to charm half of the villagers into returning both.

The lack of a mother still lingered intriguingly, though, and remained the favoured topic of gossip for years. All anyone knew with any certainty was that there had been a Wolf Moon that had ended a little differently, for usually someone who did not go through the wall to begin with was certainly never allowed to come back; none of the guards on duty that night had the heart to refuse when they were passed a small branch-woven basket, though. Instead they carried it – with some solemnity – to Noah Stilinski’s door, for the child had its name written in shining letters on the oak leaf that was pinned to its spider-spun wrappings, and every single one of the guards was grateful that the name it bore wasn’t theirs.

Noah thanked them for their trouble, equally solemnly, with his sturdy legs emerging from under a flapping nightshirt, and his piercing blue eyes rather less certain than usual. And he took the basket into his small house, and laid the basket on his small table, and pushed his hands into his wheat-gold hair and wondered what in goodness’ name he was going to do.


	2. Miss Lydia Martin; A Promise Is Made

“ _You_ went through the gap in the wall,” Stiles told his father defiantly, hugging his skinny knees to his almost-eight year old chest.

Stiles Stilinski at almost-eight looked at the world through eyes the color of the honey that’d been stolen from the Jenkins’ hives just the week before. They were wide with most certainly not innocence, but curiosity and intelligence and the same unselfconscious delight in life that’d shone from his mother’s. His eyebrows were two dark decisive brushstrokes, his hair of a color but constantly shorn short from some misadventure or another, the latest involving thirty seven chicken feathers and a batch of the shopkeeper’s glue. Stiles’ snub nose was always sniffing out trouble to get into, and his skin was moon-pale and spattered with freckles that were practically impossible to tell apart from the constant smears and smudges and splatterings of mud.

“Ah, hell and damnation,” his father said, one hand pushing through his gray-threaded hair hard enough to near wear it away. “Who told you that?”

“No one,” Stiles said, and looked at the ceiling and the drying herbs that hung there, at the fire which needed rebuilding, at the neighbourhood cat curled on the hearth that his father was too soft-hearted to chase away. All of those were far easier sights than his father’s unhappy face, which would no doubt become all the unhappier if he knew Jackson Whittemore had been using it as a taunt for almost so long as the both of them could speak.

“Well they’re right about it,” he said, “whoever it was, and I don’t regret it either, never mind about the should. Going through the wall got me you, and that’s not a thing I would ever wish different.” And Stiles’ father grabbed him by the nape of the neck and hauled him into a clumsy-limbed hug, tight and honest and all sorts of wonderful, and told him a story about the shadows under the trees, and about the honest sort of temptation that beckoned through a gap in a drystone wall, and he told him a story about the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. And perhaps his father was thinking about long dark hair and eyes like honey, but Stiles was firmly focused on Miss Lydia Martin’s curling red-gold hair.

 

The Martin family had come to Beacon Hills much the same way as any other family did: sudden, and confused, and without all that much of a reason. The town wasn’t named so for a founder, or a natural landmark, or because of the tribes that’d previously lived there; it was named for what it was, and for what it did, calling to everyone that had the ears to hear it.

There were families that didn’t take well to sunlight, and families that were entirely too guided by the shape of the moon. Families that couldn’t live too far from the lake or the river that fed it; that tended orchards that were practically relatives; that could tell you the prices at the market for a few weeks to come.

And of course there were the families who outwardly seemed to be normal. Like the Whittemores, in their beautiful pillared house in the centre of town, happy and smiling and clearly hiding _something_. Like the Martins, who settled in with all appearance of ease. And Stiles – who had been Mischief until he grew too old for such things, who had a name that not one person in the town could pronounce – had always cultivated curiosity as his prime personality trait. Thus it was that when he was not being hauled back over the wall, stubborn and flailing, he was being pulled off the Whittemores’ fencing, or out of the Martins’ bushes, or down from the Mahealanis’ stately oak.

But it was the Martins who held Stiles’ attention the longest. Mr Martin was a lawyer and frequently away in the city, and Mrs Martin had all of the latest gowns from New York; they lived as though Beacon Hills was an inconvenience that had grown up around them, and the people there were only to be tolerated at best.

It was an attitude they had worked hard to pass on to their daughter, and there was nothing – in Stiles’ opinion – so beautiful as Lydia Martin’s tip-tilted nose held high in the air. Stiles felt, if it weren’t entirely blasphemous to say so, that he _might_ have considered her a little less beautiful if her tilted nose weren’t so often pointed in the direction of chalkboards covered with numbers and equations and mathematics that went even further than numbers could carry it, if you could credit it. She was quite the brightest student in the school, and Stiles had a moment of smug satisfaction at his own forward-thinking nature that he hadn’t confined her successes to merely the company of the _girls_ there, and he most probably should have kept that observation to himself and avoided the sharp-knuckled swat she aimed at his arm. Still. The fact remained that Lydia Martin was quite the prettiest thing that Beacon Hills had ever seen, and Stiles fully intended to grow up to marry her just as soon as they were aged past ten.

Of course, when ten arrived, Stiles had the discovery of _science_ to occupy him, and he cheerfully moved his marriage plans a little further back. That science – in all its logical, elemental wonder – was accompanied by the arrival into town of sour-faced, thin-lipped Mr Harris, Stiles was willing to accept, and he pestered his babcia for a job delivering sweet-smelling parcels from the bakery in order that he might send away for heavy board-backed books with barely any pictures at all.

He even for a month or two forgot his abiding curiosity about the gap in the drystone wall that drew the border of their town, and it wasn’t until the Wolf Moon drew near and he was forced to sleep out in the field behind their house, curled up beside an accommodating sheep, that it was brought most firmly back to mind.

The man to whom his father had rented Stiles’ bed was tall and muscular, his hair cropped even closer than Stiles’, and when Stiles had slammed through the door after his deliveries he’d swear that the man’s eyes flashed the color of the banked coals on the fire. They shared a meal of vegetables stewed with wild onions and sage, complemented by half a loaf that was only a little dry from sitting out all day, and their guest ate more than twice the both of them put together. When the sun sank into its bed of trees he smiled, wide and pointy and somehow still _hungry_ , and Stiles’ father showed him the way to the gap in the drystone wall and took up the stout cudgel that was propped there. Unlike most days of the year, on the Wolf Moon Stiles’ father and a few other men guarded the _other_ side of the wall, held themselves tall and stern to prevent anything that wasn’t supposed to from coming _back._ Stiles curled himself up on a tussock of overgrown grass and listened to the great howling and clamoring that arose from the forest, and just like many others in the town that night he buried his head – into oily warm and smelly wool, for lack of a pillow – and tried to block out the sounds; he was, perhaps, the only one in the town who was doing it to prevent himself from following the call.

Life in Beacon Hills didn’t change very much, and aside from growing taller and a little more muscular and insatiable in his curiosity, neither did Stiles.

When he was eleven years old, he broke his arm falling from a tree he was attempting to use to cross the Wall; aside from where the gap was, branches would writhe and twist and buckle themselves away from extending over it, and climbing higher did nothing but result in a more decisive snap.

At twelve, he outlined a detailed and comprehensive five year plan. Some of it – discovery of a new species of dinosaur, for example, and the long and luxuriant beard – might be a little far-fetched, but he was most determined that item number one, the wooing and subsequent marrying of Miss Lydia Martin, must go off without the slightest hitch.

And at 17 years of age Stiles promised his heart away to Miss Lydia Martin and, even if she had no use for it, he had no intention of claiming it back.

 

“ _Lydia!”_

Stiles was beginning to feel a little ridiculous, his father’s best jacket flapping awkwardly around his wrists, and he tossed the next pebble up at Lydia’s window with rather more force than was advisable. It smacked into the glass with a decisive _crack_ , and a moment later the sash was pushed upward and a beautiful red-gold head poked out.

“ _Stiles?_ What in Heaven’s name are you -?”

“I have a gift for you!” Stiles hissed in the sort of whisper that really is not, and he ducked behind a decisively thorned rose bush when a lamp was lit in the kitchen. He listened with some dismay as the sash window was pushed closed with rather more force than went into the opening, and he huffed a sigh that turned to smoke in the cold air and stalked towards the part of the wall that was low enough to climb.

“I am _not_ climbing,” an imperious voice told him, and Lydia’s fine hand rested on his arm, tugging him towards a side gate that unbolted easily and in silence, and Stiles rather felt as though his tongue was a little too big for his mouth.

Lydia was dressed only in a nightgown and a finely woven shawl, and even though she tugged him to a small workman’s hut and lit a fire in the tiny iron stove, he still hauled off his father’s jacket and offered it awkwardly to her. She eyed it with some disdain for a moment, but relented and allowed him to drape it over her shoulders, her attention then caught by the basket Stiles carried by his side.

“You mentioned a gift,” she said, and he flipped back the wicker lid to show a huge tome that didn’t even bother with letters in the _title_ , and a dusty green bottle with a queer sort of cork.

“Is that champagne?” she asked, her attention entirely caught, and her brown eyes sparkled in the bare light from the stove’s grille.

“I’ve been saving,” Stiles said, with a casual sort of shrug, the sort that pretended the expense of just that one bottle of wine hadn’t cleared out entirely all of the money he had saved up, plus a little more he’d begged from his father besides.

“And what’s the occasion?” Lydia said, accepting a glass directly from his fingers, her mouth curled into a teasing smile that would linger in his dreams for _months._

“Happy birthday,” Stiles said, and he managed to open the bottle without injuring more than one small pane of a window, pouring foaming gold into her glass and his and waiting for her to take a sip and smile in what looked like wonder before he continued. “I wanted to ask you to marry me.”

She choked. It wasn’t the most promising of signs.

“ _Marry_ you?” she said, genuinely startled. “Why on earth would I _marry_ you?”

Once, a cart had come into the town, quite clearly lost on its way to somewhere far more special. The back of the cart was covered in waxed cloth and all filled up with ice, steaming faintly in the warm air that was easing into spring. When he heard how far it was up the road to the nearest city, the merchant had looked quite despairing and had demonstrated his product in the hopes that _somebody_ might buy. He had a cart full of oysters and no one with the lack of sense to buy them, but Stiles remembered suddenly his skill with a flat-bladed knife, how he had slithered it into the shell and wrenched it open with a deft twist of his wrist. All of a sudden, Stiles thought he might know how the mollusc had felt. He took a drink from his glass, feeling the bubbles squirm down to his stomach and set up fluttering there.

“Surely I’m not so bad as all that,” he said.

“I’m going to marry _Jackson_ ,” Lydia said, airy and casual, with a deft twist of her wrist. “I thought that was understood.”

“What’s Jackson got that I haven’t?” Stiles asked, mulish, and her look of pity rubbed salt into all the nerves she’d rubbed raw.

“Listen, Stiles,” she said, “you’re very sweet, but Jackson has _influence_. If I’m to persuade someone to accept me into a college –“

“I could get you into a college,” Stiles said, stubborn. “I’d find a way. And I’d work every hour to bring you the books you’d need to study from.”

“Stiles,” Lydia said, a little sad, now. She brushed her hands down her nightgown, drank the last of her champagne, and got to her feet, Stiles making way before her.

“I’d bring you gems from the far East,” Stiles said, adding a little hop and a skip to his backward steps to keep up with her stride. 

“Please don’t,” she said. 

“I’d - I’d fetch you the finest perfumes in all of California,” he said, and then nearly bit through his tongue, flailing, as his heel caught on an uneven board.

“No thank you,” she sing-songed, tossing her glossy hair over one shoulder. 

“Herbs then, and rocks, and salts,” he said, and she actually paused, raising an enquiring eyebrow. “For experiments. The finest, rarest that money can - ”

Lydia let out a small huff of annoyance. 

“Stiles, I have considerably more money than you, more than enough to keep my experiments supplied, so unless you have - ”

She fell abruptly silent as a long distant howl sounded, starting low and throbbing and rising to an unearthly wail that lingered in the night air, sharper than any oyster knife. It came from beyond the Wall, as all such things did, and when it finally died away there was a long moment’s silence. (That she only cocked her head and listened intently, didn’t shake or mutter nursery charms or make a sign against evil, was one of the reasons Stiles loved her quite so dearly). 

“For your love,” Stiles said, low and intent, “I’d bring back the heart of that wolf and place it in your hands." 

Lydia gave him a scornful look. 

"Stiles, that is disgusting. What use would I have for a  _heart?”_  She gave him a look then, an intent sort of look, but Stiles refused to acknowledge any deeper meaning. After a moment she rolled her beautiful eyes. “Its nose would be of far more use, if it’s herbs you want to provide me. Capture it and bring it back to town, if you would do me a service." 

"And in return?” Stiles asked, his heart in his mouth. 

“And in return I shall pay you,” Lydia snapped, but then relented a little. “And, when it comes time for me to marry, I shall consider your suit alongside Jackson’s, but that’s as much as I shall promise." 

"And a kiss?” Stiles said, always one to chance on furthering his luck. 

Lydia let out another of those annoyed little huffs. 

“You are far too clever to be such a dunce,” she said, but there was something in the curve of her mouth that said she was pleased with his daring, or at the very least amused by it. “But very well; bring me the wolf and I shall give you a kiss." 

Stiles grinned and stepped out from between her and the door, watching her cross to the small side gate before he poured the very last of the champagne into his glass. There was no sense in wasting it and its numbing effect, and it wasn’t as though it would fit with his plan to pack light.


	3. The World Beyond the Wall; A Meeting

Stiles set out on a Tuesday. He considered, as he walked down the hard-beaten earth path, picking his way around the cart-rutted puddle that stayed muddy even in the height of the summer, that he should perhaps have checked the post office’s calendar before he left. It felt as though the start of an epic journey – and this journey had all the makings of one – ought to begin on a date more specific than ‘Tuesday, probably still March’. It _was_ probably still March, though, and as such that odd mix of frozen-crisp mud and springtime flowers.

His father had packed his bag with a warm blanket, a sharp knife, goats cheese, a heel of bread and the rest of the winesap apples. And, heavy and jangling at the bottom, bouncing right against Stiles’ spine, he’d put an old rusted horseshoe and wouldn’t accept questioning on it, either.

“Don’t take any food from anyone,” he’d said, doing something busy with the kettle and the stove, something that kept his back to Stiles. “Don’t give anyone your name. And for the love of _god_ , Stiles, don’t offend anyone.”

“It’s like you don’t know me at all,” Stiles had answered, only half joking, and his dad had made a pained sort of sound and yanked him into a hug that sought to break at least one of his ribs.

“I’ll be careful,” he said, burying his promise safely into the shirt linen of his father’s shoulder.

“You’ll come back safe,” and his tone had made it almost a threat. Stiles didn’t respond to that – he hated making promises he wasn’t sure he could keep.

Close to the wall, the houses and barns and sheds faded away, leaving a wide strip of barren land on which even the path eventually gave up, sprouting tufts and hanks of tough grass and wild flowers for the lack of feet to keep it bare. Stiles almost tripped over a spot of crab grass and a nasty laugh came from the wall’s gap.

Leaning against it, where Stiles’ father usually stood, was Jackson Whittemore, looking every inch the mayor’s son and every inch a nasty piece of work. He wore a smirk like it was the latest thing, and quirked an eyebrow as Stiles drew near.

“Going back where you belong, freak?” he asked, and Stiles rolled his eyes and squared his shoulders, heading directly for the gap in the wall. No one was allowed through, not on a random Tuesday in Possibly March, but Jackson made no move to stop him. (And Stiles almost entirely didn’t wish that he would).

“They’re not human, you know,” Jackson said. “Whatever the hell it is that lives over there, they’re not human.” He considered for a second, not moving as Stiles walked determinedly past him, and then Stiles felt an unbalancing yank to his pack, swift and painful, and he landed on his tailbone in the frozen dirt.

Jackson loomed over him like some kind of avenging angel, blond-haired and blue-eyed and all sculpted to perfection, like the pictures you saw in books. His face was twisted into an angry scowl, and Stiles scooted back because he knew that look, he recognised it, and most often it had ended in bruises.

“You’re pathetic,” he said. “You’re a pathetic freak, with a crazy father and a freakish mother, and whatever the hell it is that lives in those woods, it’s gonna –“

He cut himself off when something under the trees _growled_. Whatever it was, whatever primeval beast crouched there, it must’ve been the size of a lion at least for the growl to reach them all the way at the wall. Jackson hopped over to the right side of the wall, the safe side, and gave another of those laughs that had more in common with hyenas than humor.

“Oh man, Stilinski,” he said. “You’re gonna _die_.”

“I’m not going to die,” Stiles said, pushing himself back to his feet and steeling himself, wrapping both hands around the straps of his pack so he could hide their shaking. “I’m going to marry Lydia.”

“You’re what?” Jackson said, but Stiles was already beyond his reach, and the coward wouldn’t come out from behind the safety of the wall if Stiles paid him. “Wait, Stilinski, you’re _what?_ ”

There was a growl, another, and even at the height of morning the shadows under the trees were impenetrable.

“Oh god,” Stiles said, under his breath and over his chattering teeth, “I’m going to die.”

When approaching one’s own demise – perhaps especially when one’s walking towards it at an even pace, trying with every fibre to project an air of unconcern – the senses sharpen until everything seems almost too real to be borne.

The oddest thing, the thing to which Stiles diverted what attention he could spare from the shadows under the trees, was the way that the weather on this side of the Wall seemed to belong to a different place entirely, or a different time in the year. The air was sweet with flowers and warm, the sort of heat that was long-baked, summer evening shading into the first hints of Fall. There was no crunch of frost underfoot, and the breath from Stiles’ mouth – coming a little faster now – didn’t visibly give him away.

The shadows under the trees shifted a little. More precisely, whatever waited within them moved, a patch of deeper darkness catching the lack of light differently. And if Stiles had suspected he was being watched before, persuaded so by the attention of the hairs at the base and back of his neck, he was left in no doubt when twin lights appeared. They were as eerily luminescent as a cat caught unawares in the night time, but a shade of pale blue that Stiles had only read about, like bioluminescence in distant and dangerous caves. Nothing living, nothing _natural_ ought to have eyes like that, and the feeling of desperate relief – and of odd, painful disappointment – when they moved and turned away was enough almost for Stiles’ knees to give out. Only the certain knowledge that Jackson Whittemore was watching, waiting with gleeful anticipation for the moment Stiles wobbled and proved Jackson right, was enough to firm his step and keep him walking until the thick and impenetrable branches were arching overhead.

The ground under the trees was baked solid and scattered with pine needles; the deciduous trees seemed a little more jealous of their greenery, no matter what time of year it might feel like. There wasn’t really an obvious path, but neither did any direction look overcrowded and like access might be a trial. Stiles cast about for a moment, and then decided entirely arbitrarily on a direction, without the slightest consideration that it was about as far from where the eyes had disappeared as could be managed. With one last glance over his shoulder – and the fact that glance included Jackson Whittemore made his decision all the easier – he set off between the trees.

A less curious sort, more god-fearing perhaps, might have recited something like the Lord’s Prayer for bravery and strength. Stiles was a scientist, and while he considered reciting his multiplication tables, if only for the sound of a voice, his mind was diverted by a single line from a nursery rhyme: _My mother said I never should play with the fairies in the wood._ Try as he might, Stiles couldn’t recollect what happened if the narrator disobeyed, so it wasn’t all that much of a discouragement – and besides, he had never really had a mother.

Almost too late, when he had almost gone too far to catch any glimpse of the Wall and the world that lay beyond it, Stiles recalled that he had taken care to stow a piece of chalk in his pack just for this – for there was no use finding a wolf for Miss Lydia Martin if he couldn’t find the way to bring the beast home. He drew two careful rings around the trunk of an aspen, stacked one above the other and thick enough to be seen from a way away. He must have been a little too industrious in his drawing, since the tree quaked, a fluttering shudder that set its leaves to rustling, and something uncomfortable and unpleasant and wriggling fell into the collar of Stiles’ shirt.

In half a minute he had fished it out; the intervening moments of flailing and squawking are better not discussed. He spared a glower for the unwelcoming tree, and made sure to defiantly mark two others within eyeshot, just to make _certain_ that he wouldn’t lose his way.

It was difficult to judge the passage of time from the strange diffused-green light that fell under the trees, broken up by the occasional golden clearing that became less and less frequent as Stiles walked further into the wood. Darkness seemed to fall all at once, although Stiles supposed, when he thought back, that it _had_ been getting a little harder to see. Rather than risk a fire being seen by whatever folk abided in these woods, Stiles found a secure perch for himself in an accommodating cedar, just far enough up to avoid the average night prowling wildlife but not nearly so far that he’d break bones if he unsettled himself in the night.

And the faint lights that glimmered through the trees – ember-red, and flame-yellow, and that dangerous bioluminescent blue – those must be some new species of firefly, and nothing more.

 

Stiles woke abruptly at a loud growl beneath him, flailing upright and remembering too late about his precarious perch. His pack was more securely anchored than he was, apparently, for his unbalanced tumble was painfully arrested by the strap catching around his leg, suspending him upside down with his barely-grown hair brushing the ground clear of pine needles.

Somewhere far off there was a girl’s laughter that was edging on cruel. Closer to, a pair of feet shifted into Stiles’ view, bare and mud-stained and tough-soled. The trousers the man wore were too short to rightly be called so, flapping raggedly about his calves, and as Stiles’ gaze travelled down – or up, perhaps, towards the man’s head – he saw that his chest was entirely bare. Stiles flushed brightly red, from more than the blood that was rapidly filling his head, and couldn’t decide quite where to look. He decided that the face was safest, for it wore a smile under dark eyes and darker hair, sympathetic and, while a little amused, not cruel with it.

“Hey,” the man said. “You look like you could use a hand.”

He set to untangling Stiles before he could formulate a more polite response than what instantly came to mind, and he was careful about it, lowering Stiles gently to the ground in a display of a strength that was unexpected from the man’s wiry frame.

“Thanks,” Stiles said, perhaps a little grudgingly. He rescued his pack from the tree, attempted to check its contents without making it entirely obvious, and settled it back on his shoulder. It was only then that he remembered his manners and abruptly held out his hand.

The man regarded it for a moment, head cocked to one side, then grasped it firmly and tugged, taking Stiles by surprise and off-balance, so he had an armful of sinewy muscle before he had time even to blink. A face was tucked into his neck, loud snuffling sounds reached his ear, and Stiles pushed down any and all flavour of warm reaction and shoved himself backwards hard enough that he tripped over a root and fell onto his behind.

“What,” he said, “in the name of Darwin’s prodigious beard was _that?_ ”

“Hi,” the guy said, holding out a hand so casually that Stiles had taken it and been pulled to his feet almost without noticing. “I’m Scott.” His tone of voice was likewise breezy, almost as though he hadn’t just buried his face in the crook of Stiles’ neck, and the breach of good manners was so very severe and so wildly unexpected that Stiles wasn’t sure entirely how to even bring it up.

“I –“ he said, helpless, mouthing vaguely at the air, shaping wild and intricate inquiries with his hands, “you –“

He deflated, quite without the words.

“I’m Stiles,” he said instead.

**Author's Note:**

> This work is currently without a beta, so please do let me know if I've made any avoidable mistakes. If anyone could help out, I would appreciate it!


End file.
